


my red thoughts in a red shade

by Smilla



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2007, AU, Dealfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-26
Updated: 2010-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-10 07:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smilla/pseuds/Smilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day you finally knew what you had to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my red thoughts in a red shade

**Author's Note:**

> Love to Desertport for her beta job. Title from [To Sleep](http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13552), by H. Cole. Dedicated to Siluria in the occasion of her birthday. Originally posted [here](http://smilla02.livejournal.com/100143.html).

_One day you finally knew  
what you had to do, and began,  
though the voices around you  
kept shouting  
their bad advice --  
though the whole house  
began to tremble  
and you felt the old tug  
at your ankles._

\- [](http:)The Journey, by Mary Oliver

-*-

 

Dean hadn't been the tallest for a long time. He wasn't when Sam left that first time. Sam remembers looking down at them, at Dean and John. That time. First time he'd felt taller.

But Sam had never measured heights by foot or inch. Rather measured them by the span of Dean's arms, and he'd always fit there. In his father's too.

So he looks at Dean while he plays in the yellow grass, waist-deep in it, and it's late summer, red burnt soil under his feet, and Dean is playing in the grass.

This isn't a memory. It's not something that's happened. He remembers staying a whole month in Iowa, but it was winter and the corn had been harvested, leaving behind fields of red earth, naked and bald.

Dean raises his arms, like a wave, an invitation. Like absolution. But the sun, mid-morning sun, is blinding Sam, and bathes Dean in pure-white light, like a flare, like flames and Sam has to close his eyes.

It is not a memory, so it must be a dream.

"It's not a dream," says Jim, _ Pastor Jim_ says Dad's voice in his head. Dad's tone is more disappointed than reproachful and it's the disappointment that always hurts most. He turns to tell Dad exactly that, but Dad's not here, so he asks Pastor Jim:

"What is it?"

"This is so you can remember," Pastor Jim says. "Do you remember, Sam?"

Sam remembers many things. He remembers falling hard on his knees. He remembers the dirt and he remembers the stones where they'd dug into his palms. He remembers a scream, his or Dean's. Both. Short, sharp, bitten down. The hole, big and fatal, all his blood freezing in his veins.

He remembers the hole, like a mortal gap in his body, that Dean left behind.

"You have the answer, " Pastor Jim says, and when Sam raises his eyes, the field of corn isn't there anymore, and neither is Dean.

Pastor Jim looks at him; there's a cut on his neck, from ear to ear, quite obvious now that the sun isn't blinding him, yellow and crusted like it's an old wound and it's stopped hurting. Sam remembers that too, that Pastor Jim is dead. But Jim smiles, serene and patient, and Sam asks, "If this isn't a dream, then what is it?"

"It is what you want it to be," Pastor Jim says, then walks down the aisles of his church where the walls are made of grey stone. He kneels at the altar, where Christ hangs on the cross.

"Then it is a dream," Sam decides, and wakes up in his motel room, to the forced dark of drawn up curtains, to his sore body and his burning eyes.

He looks at his watch and it's two -- in the afternoon? -- two, minus five.

Dean's been dead for a week.

-*-

In the motel room there's a dresser, a chair, and a mirror. The bed.

The mirror is broken in two places. Bottom left: a large crack but old, the edges smooth and dark with dirt; a fresh one right in the middle of it, where Sam threw his cell at it.

Each time he walks in front of the mirror he can see his face distorted and multiplied in that net of cracks, cut in half. He's stopped looking at it.

In the room there's a dresser, a chair and a mirror. One single bed, olive-grey carpet on the floor, stained and faded. The chair wobbles on its legs when Sam sits on it.

Dean isn't in the room.

-*-

He's walking on a street and it's daytime. His feet drag slightly on the concrete, and he's bent against a wind that doesn't ruffle his hair or flap his jacket. In the periphery of his vision he can see people walking too, doing their business. Living. Sam notices, with a sort of startled concern, that the world didn't end with Dean. He retreats to the shadowed side of the street, to the shade where life is less vibrant and doesn't hurt his eyes.

The room was good for him, good for containing his thoughts with its geometrical precision, but they'd knocked on his door, early morning. Bang, bang, bang. _Fuck man, this room stinks. You fuck the hell out, now._

He'd left the room, then. Still afraid of climbing into the Impala. But he'd driven here, hadn't he? When Dean left, he'd driven here.

There's a cup of coffee in his hand, but he can't remember when he bought it or when he decided to walk. He'd felt good sitting against the bark of a tree, feeling the rough textures of it chafing his shoulder blades, crossed legs going numb. Whishing the rest of him would go numb too while he sat guarding the last of Dean's possessions.

"Sam," Jessica says, quiet and gentle, as if she weren't a ghost, as if she were really there.

She's been talking nonstop since when he left the motel room. She appeared at his left elbow, scent of cinnamon and dead flowers. She smells like life, with her hair trailing behind her like a flag, waving in the air.

"Sam," she says, "stop. Please."

"You're not real. You're not real, Jessica, stop following me."

She isn't, she can't be. He's hallucinating, mind overworked and body exhausted, sleep-deprived and feverish. Seeing things and hearing voices. She isn't a ghost: Sam's not even sure he wants her to be one.

"I'm as real as you want me to be," she says, cryptic and sad. But Sam's so tired of hearing people talking in backward riddles and she chose a bad moment to come back to him. For all the times he's sought her, he wants her gone.

"What do you want?" he asks instead. "You didn't even know Dean."

"I would have loved to," she says, adding the guilt on top of everything. The two people he'd loved the most in his life and he'd made them strangers.

With all this light, he can't see her face, and the memory of her is wavering. Her color, though – like gold – is still bright.

"You can do it, "she says." Go down there and bring your brother back. You can do it."

Yes, she's talking in riddles. She's the part of him that's fever-crazy and delusional.

"Go away, Jess."

She's just a figment of his imagination, and without regrets, he leaves her, leaves her standing on the corner in front of a bakery, smell of fresh baked bread that makes his mouth water and his stomach turn.

-*-

The windshield is dirty, a big splat of water mixed with sand. It's rained briefly, a spray of water that's dotted the car with yellow blotches. Like the car has a pox and Sam laughs into the crisp morning air. He laughs.

On the car floor, passenger side, there's his duffel. Dean's is in the back, his dirty clothes still inside.

On the passenger seat, there's Dean's leather jacket. The jacket has a rip under the armpit, along the seam. Sam was hanging on to Dean's arm when the hellhounds came. Sam ripped the jacket.

On the backseat, there are two paper bags, one brown and one white. In the white one there was raspberry pie, a hamburger in the brown. Dean's last meal. Both are still bleeding grease that seeps slowly onto the leather.

Dean isn't in the car.

-*-

A day passes, or a week, it doesn't matter. This time it's a cop who knocks on the window. Sam can't see his eyes behind his Ray Bans, an old model with large mirror-lenses, green. _You all right, son?_ he asks, and Sam straightens in the seat, rolls down the window. He feels a swift rush of fresh air hit his face and mix with the air in the Impala, which is stale and thick with a hint of Dean's scent trapped inside. The fresh air takes it away.

_You can't stay here._

_Yes, sir_, he says, and fires up the engine. Because he doesn't know where to go, he goes toward the highway.

Dad appears sometime when daylight lingers on the last strands of light. Sam can only see him when he passes another car, when incoming headlights bleed into every crevice and interstice of the roof. Dad sits in the passenger seat, loose and comfortable. The only other time Sam has ever seen him there, Dean was bleeding his life away behind him.

"Go away," he tells John. Go away, he asks him. He can't muster the energy to be angry, but some things should be said, even when they're lies.

"It's your fault," he tells John, and surprisingly John nods.

Dean's music is playing since Sam started the car, a Motorhead cassette tape, and Sam can't make himself turn it off.

John stays silent, and for thirty-seven miles Sam drives, with the road stretching straight and familiar and John tapping the dashboard to the beat of Dean's old tapes.

"What do you want?" he asks him in the end, because Dad's always been more patient than him. But when Dad talks, a horn booms and headlights burn his eyes, and both drown out Dad's voice. Sam swerves to the right, violently and reenters his own lane

He's expecting Dean's voice. _Dude, you hurt my baby I'll kick your ass into the next century._ But the cab is silent and Dad's gone. And Dean's voice won't come, won't tell him what to do.

Dad reappears some time later, in the cone of light from an eighteen-wheeler.

"What do you want me to do, Dad?"

"I don't know what to do, Dad."

"Dad… ."

Dad stays silent in the passenger seat, and there's only the music to break the silence as Dad goes on drumming his fingers to Dean's tape.

Sam thinks, _Figures_. It's not like he's ever been able to hear his dad anyway.

-*-

There's cool mist in the air. It clings on his hair, on his eyelashes, like tears. The road is empty and the Impala is the only car around.

There's a smell like something rotting in the sun, road-kill on the side of the road, a cat, a dog, a squirrel. He can't say.

There are wildflowers along the curb, growing up to the white line, little crowns of yellow petals and long, green stems.

Dean isn't here.

-*-

He parks beside a phone booth on the side of the road. There are quarters in the pocket of his hoodie and the street is deserted. He was never meant to be the last man standing.

After two rings, Bobby answers the phone. _Sam,_ he calls with that soft voice of his and Sam hopes his silence is enough to let him know that Dean's dead because he's not sure he can use words to say it.

You won't find any answers in a book, Bobby had told him once. And Sam hadn't, but he hadn't found them anywhere else. And he hasn't saved Dean.

_ I'm sorry, Sam. I'm sorry. Come back home._ Bobby's voice breaks then, but Sam hangs up on that request. He only called because Bobby deserves to know. He can't make the fact of Dean dying any less real, and Sam will not dilute the grief by talking about it.

Ruby stands behind him. "You know what to do, Sam."

He shakes his head. She belongs to tacky motel rooms, to the dim light of a lamp. She belongs to obscurity. Not to the open road that was Dean's and his. Their home.

"It would be easy, Sam."

She's right: of all the crap she's fed him this is true. Sam is this close to giving in to her venomous advice. There's already something dark and alive inside him that is pushing and pushing and close to spilling out. _Bang. Bang. Bang_. Against his chest. _Bang. Bang. Bang._ Against his skull.

He climbs inside the car, and she follows. She climbs into the Impala, sits where Dad was sitting.

"You can save Dean," she says. "Take your place, Sam. It was made for you, cut for your body, made so it could wrap around your brain. It fits you in all the ways that count. It's waiting for you."

She wants him to destroy the world.

As he shoots her, the only regret he feels is that she's going to stain the upholstery. But she doesn't bleed, and Sam has nothing to regret.

-*-

There's Jim, _Pastor Jim_, and his lips move silently, his head bent forward. A black-leather book is closed around his thumb, his left hand wrapped protectively on top of it.

There's Jess, complete trust in her eyes and voice. She used to say, in a way Sam believed _There's nothing you can't do, Sam._

There's Dad and his scratchy voice. In the dimness of an anonymous living room in a rented house in southern Tennessee, he'd laid the basic credo of their life: salt for ghosts, silver for werewolves and if it's a cross, it'll stop a vampire too.

Holy water works for demons. Holy water, and they hate the name of God.

There's a glimmer of an idea. A candle-sized flame in a roaring sea of orange and red, drowned by that bigger fire. But he's trapped it.

He's got a plan. The only thing that's missing is Dean.

-*-

They let him pass through the gates. Without any questions, they let him in. He feels the heat on his body, the flames licking at his feet without burning. The laments of those lost souls -- pale shadows writhing in a starless air -- stroke his skin like the sharp claws of a harpy.

They look real to Sam, those people, made of flesh and bones, in constant movement of cries, and sighs; a steady noise of slapping hands, unknown accents and burning flesh.

Minos stops him at the door, long serpent tail unraveled at his feet. It touches his legs with its split ends. "Go away," growls Minos, a large grin around sharp teeth, around a blood-red mouth. "There's no place for the living behind this door," he says. "Or for the hope you wish to carry there."

But Sam pays him no heed, leaves him behind in that empty darkness, walks through the storm, and then the rain. Through the spiteful words and the miasmic ponds. He walks above the graves of fire and then walks more, across the bridge, over a river of simmering blood that foams pink and thick against the brimstones.

He steps into a garden, where the trees are brown and twisted, and leaves behind the barks of the bitches. The demons with red eyes growl in his ears, but they too let him pass.

He always walks looking ahead, in a darkness that clings to his pores and then soaks inside. It prods and looks for those hollow places where it can settle and grow. Sam can feel it shifting, curiously hovering at a close distance, because he's walking alive with his mortal body, in a place that was never meant for life.

Only for pain. Eternal. And it seems unfair to him, that the single span of a life could deserve such a disproportionate punishment.

Dean is like a beam of light in the dark, even when he himself is a dark form against the stones, and when his blood is running in rivulets around him. They took all of Dean. They took his soul and they took his body but they left him intact, and when Sam kneels reverently in front of him, Dean looks up and everything of him is still whole.

"He's bound by his words," the evil voices say. "By his will. You can't take him away. "

Sam takes what's left of Dean's hand in his own, the bloody stump the demons chewed. He looks at it as it grows under his eyes, the palm straightening, the fingers lengthening, the hand whole again.

"Sam," Dean says. "You came."

Sam stands, drags Dean's body up with him, and when he says His name, it booms like blasphemy in that unholy place, beats like a hammer on those walls, makes the empty sky fall, and with it the rocks, and the blood to rain on them. The cries, those of the damned and those of the demons, all rise high and blend together.

Sam says His name like a curse, like a malediction, without any love left for the God that left him hesitant in the fast current, fighting a war against all odds, with weak tools for weapons and on his side only the foolish love of a brother.

He shouts the name of that God that only gave him a mortal body and fragile skin, that gave him blood to be spilled and gave him doubts. That same God that gave him loss and gave him guilt, and only gave him the foolish love of his brother.

Sam shouts His name and Hell crumbles, dissolves, implodes, all around him. And Sam thinks this is the last time he's doing God's dirty work. The last time. And He can take care of all the souls that have no place to go anymore, and of the demons too. It was His problem to start with.

The roars around him become wails, dragged out and pitiful, and then he is deaf; the wind is so fast he has to close his eyes, and then he's blind. Behind his eyelids there's only darkness and under his hands Dean's broken body. After a while, there's nothing at all, but Sam thinks that too is all right.

-*-

Some choices are easy to make.

Sam chooses the world and having Dean in it.

-*-

Sam is kneeling, and there are rocks under his hands, dirt under his fingernails, thick black lines and only a hint of white. He shakes his head, raises his gaze to a summer-scented wood, and a starlit night.

It's not the place he left from, but the air is warm, not hot anymore, and Sam remembers summer. Of all the seasons, it was always the one he loved best.

On his left there's a mound of earth, body-shaped, covered with leaves and jagged, white rocks. Sam thinks, a sense of victory swelling in his chest, that this at least, wasn't a dream.

And then Dean moves, first an arm, naked flesh, ash-grey and charred. Then the other and last his legs. Tiny avalanche of dirt when he's up on his knees,. Then Dean's crawling on the moss, leaves behind two deep grooves where his legs trail in the earth. His head is bent, and Sam can only see the furrowed lines on his forehead, can imagine Dean focusing on moving, can imagine the intensity of his eyes as he strains to fill the gap between them.

Dean's body is scarred under the smooth, dark thin lines at the juncture of legs and hipbone, around the elbows and higher on his arms, at his navel, around his throat, like he's one of those plastic dolls, like he could be taken apart in six pieces, and then reassembled.

Sam moves then, crawls himself to meet him halfway, so he can take Dean's head in his hands, and see for himself that they're alive, the both of them.

-*-

Music drifts from the radio – a clean sound of guitars, a smoke-rough voice -- the song familiar even if Sam can't place it.

There's a plastic bag between his legs, with bread inside and ham. There's beer, a six pack in the cooler on the back seat.

The windshield is rolled all the way down. His hair flutters in the wind, and the sun is burning his right arm, from elbow to hand.

The road twists around a hill, a rocky wall on the right, stained green and orange with minerals. The air smells of salt and water, and the waves worry at this side of the road, so close Sam thinks he could touch the ropes of water that break on the rocks.

There's a little beach after the next bend, a small pool of calm water protected from the currents by two protrusions of rock. Sam remembers dun-colored sand, soft under his feet.

Dean is driving them there.  
\--


End file.
